bcrl

43 ms·

631.
by bcrl 4y ago
No, that doesn't solve the problem -- I had a few megabytes of fast RAM, and it still sucked. The chipset bus is completely contended in 4 bitplane high res graphics in OCS/ECS, so any attempt to access the serial port registers
632.
by bcrl 4y ago
The Amiga's built in serial port was particularly atrocious as the hardware could only buffer 1 character at a time. This meant that it did not work particularly well at baud rates above 9600. Combined with the CPU being starved from
633.
by bcrl 4y ago
The PLL is external, but the chipset had the ability to accept an external clock from the start in the Amiga 1000.
634.
by bcrl 4y ago
Genlock support in the chipset was quite neat. The genlock contained a Phase Locked Loop that provided the 28.63636 MHz clock input on the video connector so that the entire system ran off that clock which was synchronized to the video str
635.
by bcrl 4y ago
That was the way things were back in the 1980s. The only reason I managed to gain any experience programming in C on my Amiga is because one of my uncles bought me a $400 compiler to use (Aztec C). Things became easier in the 1990s as gcc
636.
by bcrl 4y ago
Just what we need. Shipping containers being pulled out of the shipping industry are one of the contributing factors to supply chain chaos over the last couple of years. Hopefully these containers will return to where they're needed.
637.
by bcrl 4y ago
The death of rail is sad, period. Watching all the steel for the old rail lines being ripped out of the ground since the 1980s is so short sighted. Obtaining rights of way to rebuild lines will be virtually impossible in the modern world.
638.
by bcrl 4y ago
No, that isn't a realistic option. My grandparent's place over in Germany is a huge 3 story place heated by a hot water boiler system and plenty of rooms. There's absolutely no way that you can heat that place with electric
639.
by bcrl 4y ago
The code is missing a memory barrier. x86 has a strongly ordered memory model, but writes can reside in the store buffer and take a long time before becoming visible to other parts of the system.
640.
by bcrl 4y ago
The commit message is also for future me. Future me doesn't remember what today me can easily recall about the last week of debugging and reverse engineering about how the system works. A thorough commit message can really help when
641.
by bcrl 4y ago
Phone calls are not secure. It's pretty easy to get control of a phone number. The local number porting process is really easy to exploit, as is the network if you can obtain SS7 access. SS7 is very much like BGP in that it was desi
642.
by bcrl 4y ago
Maybe the problem is with the bloated apps that don't free memory? You can't blame the kernel for that. I routinely see Firefox consuming 10GB of RAM on my Linux desktop. It's nuts.
643.
by bcrl 4y ago
No, the scheduler has nothing to do with the performance of spinlocks. By definition, a spinlock "spins" until the lock is acquired. When you have multiple CPUs performing atomic operations on a single cache line, that cache lin
644.
by bcrl 4y ago
I still think the curfew was an overreaction. It is normal for drunk rednecks to do stupid things like shooting at random infrastructure, although fibre optic cables are a more typical target since a transformer is just way too easy of a t
645.
by bcrl 4y ago
I had a single page reference card (plastic) for the 6502 that had everything you needed to know on it -- it was awesome! It was used many times while hacking around on the Apple ][+ computers we had in grade school. I miss the days when
646.
by bcrl 4y ago
Maybe you missed out on all the concentration of media assets that has happened over the past 40 years. We went from every small town having their own newspaper and small cities having their own TV stations to having moguls like Conrad Bla
647.
by bcrl 4y ago
We used simple bit spinlocks early in the multiprocessor scalability work done on the Linux kernel. While nearly "optimal" in terms of memory usage and simplicity, they tend to fall apart rather dramatically on systems with highe
648.
by bcrl 4y ago
It's far more likely to be vandalism, and that happens from time to time with infrastructure all over the place. Jumping to such an extreme overreaction does nothing other than make life miserable for everyone that's innocent. D
649.
by bcrl 4y ago
Curfew seems excessive. We have had a number of 8-12 hour power outages around here and the local governments have never declared curfew. Parts of Ottawa were without power in the spring for 2 weeks after the derecho and there was no curf
650.
by bcrl 4y ago
But as soon as there's a conversion to/from fiat or anything else in the real world, you have to trust whatever exchange or vendor you're dealing with. That means it's still a system that requires trust. With cash and
651.
by bcrl 4y ago
Any ISP that wants to peer with Bell either pays them to connect directly, or pays Bell for transport links to IXes in the United States. It's a win-win if you're Bell!
652.
by bcrl 4y ago
Bell Canada seems to be doing quite well at it. They reabsorbed the Bell Aliant assets in Ontario a few years ago and removed themselves from TorIX (the TORonto Internet eXchange, the largest IX in Ontario of which Bell Aliant was a member
653.
Motorola 68030 wire wrap prototype(retrocomputingforum.com)
189 points by bcrl 4y ago|70 comments
654.
by bcrl 4y ago
Apparently nobody gets my humor: if you do an A-B test where 40% of the users experience rage level anger at the experience and the other 60% are fine with it, clearly the A-B test indicates that the change is fine and should be implemented
655.
by bcrl 4y ago
Text messages are too hard to search, which is why I email myself notes, todos and other reminders.
656.
by bcrl 4y ago
I bought an ET-12000 this year, and Epson has the absolute worst out of box experience of all the printers I have ever bought. After powering the printer up for the first time, one has to press and hold a button on the front panel for seve
657.
by bcrl 4y ago
According to the A-B test, yes.
658.
by bcrl 4y ago
As far as power generation goes, burning coal is the most lethal source of electricity we have. Take a look at https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy or any number of other sources for information on the relat
659.
by bcrl 4y ago
Because burning coal kills people?
660.
by bcrl 4y ago
We have come full circle: x86 killed the mainframe; x86 has become the mainframe.

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